I upgraded from a Pixel 5 to 6 a couple years ago due to the unfixable OTA hardware security bug in the 1-5 models.

Some days I'd like more storage but really I can't see what else a newer device would get me. LineageOS 23 is asking me to upgrade to it; I guess I should after the December patches land.

Fortunately, we have you -- a knowledgeable human, who can propose the right points!

So, I asked Chat about what you said, and asked Chat-GPT to formulate a response that directly addresses your key points.
Let me know if it reads like randomly extruded text, or if it has relevance to your understanding and argument:

---
The Campi Flegrei project you’re describing was a natural hydrothermal system, not an engineered superhot-rock (SHR) system, and that distinction matters for both the chemistry and the physics.

A hydrothermal reservoir taps naturally circulating volcanic brine. Its fluid chemistry is whatever the rock has been stewing in for centuries: arsenic, boron, mercury, dissolved metals, HS, etc. The industry learned long ago that natural brines often destroy turbines, foul condensers, and require scrubbing that wipes out the thermodynamic efficiency. Those problems are real, and your experience confirms them.

Superhot-rock geothermal is a different class of project. It does not rely on natural brines, natural permeability, or natural aquifers. SHR / modern EGS systems:

Bring their own working fluid (usually treated water in a closed or semi-closed loop),

Create engineered fracture networks rather than using natural ones,

Operate in a supercritical regime (>374C, high pressure) where heat transport is dominated by convective sweep rather than slow conduction, and

Are sited where mantle heat flux is extremely high (e.g., Newberry), not just where water has accumulated in shallow formations.

The key point is that the problems you encountered at Campi Flegrei — toxic brine chemistry, turbine contamination, and power losses from scrubbing — are specific to hydrothermal geology, not to engineered SHR systems. SHR avoids most of that simply because it doesn’t use the volcanic soup; it uses injected water circulating through a designed heat-exchange zone.

Your numbers actually underline the potential: you were getting ~50 MW per well from a shallow (~350–400C) hydrothermal system with awful chemistry. Modern SHR aims for rock in the 400–500C+ range, with supercritical water carrying far more enthalpy per kilogram and without the brine-chemistry penalty.

Whether SHR proves economical at scale is still an open engineering question. But the Campi Flegrei outcome doesn’t generalize to SHR any more than the problems of early natural-steam geothermal plants generalized to modern binary-cycle systems.

Does this distinction make sense from your point of view?

JPEGXL really does everything webp does and so much more, and it's well thought out.

WebP isn't terrible; they are smaller than I would have guessed given that they have the container overhead, but there's no stunning argument for it. "Better than PNG for what we used PNG for." OK, true, but.

Google should just let AV1 be AV1 and focus on pushing HEVC out of the market with it. The real opponents of progress have left the image space and are mucking around with video and VR now. Google has the capability to do something about this and foster innovation.

Yes. It really is a moral duty to tell the Wright brothers that their pie in the sky visions have a track history of failure -- to remind them that there are good reasons flight isn't already a commonplace thing.

I talked with Chat-GPT to understand its argument, and the gist was: the critique about low thermal conductivity was absolutely correct for the geothermal attempts between ~1970 and 2010. But modern “superhot rock” geothermal is operating in a very different regime.

First, they can now induce vastly more fractures in the rock. Heat transfer in geothermal isn’t about the raw conductivity of solid rock - it’s about surface area. More fractures = more exposed hot rock = more efficient heat sweep. The fracture networks used today are orders of magnitude larger than the old HDR trials.

Second, the water isn’t just hot water or steam anymore. At these temperatures and pressures it becomes a supercritical fluid. That matters because it convects heat through the fracture network instead of relying on slow conduction. So you don’t get the old “hot spot next to the well / cold depleted zone” behavior - the fluid actively evens out temperature gradients.

Third, the sites they’re using now (like Newberry Volcano) have massively higher heat flux from below. Many of the early HDR projects were drilled into generic crustal hot rock with weak replenishment. Near a volcano, the heat flow is orders of magnitude higher.

Add to that the modern toolkit - horizontal drilling (mid-2000s onward), high-temperature drilling materials, computer-modeled fracture design, etc. None of this existed during the early HDR experiments that gave geothermal a bad reputation.

Chat-GPT summed it with a metaphor: the old Hot Dry Rock systems were like trying to heat your house using a candle in the corner. Tiny fracture zones, minimal surface area, conduction-limited, fast local cooling and slow reheating.

The new approach is more like engineering a large underground heat exchanger connected to a huge volcanic heat source.

And yes, you can overdraw heat - just like you can over-pump groundwater. But operators don’t have to push it that hard, and modern models tell them exactly how much heat they can sustainably take each year.

I don't understand these topics deeply? I'm hoping that you do, and that this will mean something to you.

I'm not an engineer, but here's what Chat-GPT thinks, when I shared your comment with it:

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Not quite. This criticism is valid for old-school “hot dry rock” geothermal (1970-2010), but it doesn’t apply to the new superhot-rock designs.

It’s true that rock has low thermal conductivity and that conduction-limited systems cool locally if you withdraw heat faster than it flows back. That’s exactly why the early HDR [Lion: -- this means "Hot Dry Rock"] experiments never scaled.

But superhot-rock geothermal isn’t using the old model.

Three things have changed:

Supercritical water (>374C, high pressure).
At these temperatures you’re no longer circulating liquid water or steam. Supercritical fluid behaves like a gas in viscosity but carries heat like a liquid, and has dramatically higher enthalpy. It transfers heat through fractured rock convectively, not purely by conduction. That’s a completely different thermodynamic regime than the classic HDR studies.

Engineered fracture networks (modern EGS).
Today’s EGS looks much more like a controlled, high-permeability heat exchanger than a single injection well in a monolithic rock mass. You’re creating a huge surface area and letting supercritical fluid sweep heat through it. The limiting factor becomes the fracture network, not the bulk conductivity of a single block of granite.

Volcanic settings with very high heat flux.
The Newberry system is only a few miles from an active magma body. The heat inflow from depth is orders of magnitude higher than at the old HDR field sites. You still have to manage production rates, but you’re no longer relying on conduction through kilometers of cold crust.

The “if it were workable we’d already be using it” argument also doesn’t hold. We didn’t have:

* horizontal drilling at scale until the mid-2000s,

* the ability to design fracture networks with modern HPC,

* high-temperature drilling materials,

* or any commercial attempts at supercritical geothermal

until the last decade.

The physics hasn’t changed, but the engineering finally can reach the temperatures where supercritical convection dominates and where the geothermal resource is effectively thousands of times denser.

Superhot geothermal still has plenty of open questions (scaling, economics, long-term well integrity), but the “thermal conductivity of rock makes it impossible” critique is describing the previous generation of geothermal, not the current one.

In the markets, if enough people believe in the correlation then it magically becomes a causation.

> The failure of successive COPs to agree to get rid of fossil fuels means that this is going to become necessary

Nobody believes this anymore.

Global temperatures are cyclical and the current trend is very close to the normal periodic cycle. All the "models" have failed. Sure, 95% of "Climate Scientists" believe their funding should continue but the jig is up.

If they actually attempt to blot out the sun there is no limit to what normal thinking people will do to stop them.

Fortunately they are very unlikely to get any real support for this harebrained scheme.

Why is it more cost effective to build a new Capitol than to build a water pipeline?

> from a security, stability or usable prospective

You and me both but most people only score feature count. If they've grown accustomed to some oddball feature for a few months they feel they can never use anything else.

That they went their entire lives without it before isn't relevant.

From a market perspective, rushing more features to market makes more people with money happy than getting a good product to market.

It sounds like Nokia, once a great company, thought they would just pay up? But I read elsewhere that a patent troll called Avanci was behind the shakedowns?

If HP and Dell begin to make this more common and could encourage Lenovo and Apple to follow suit, then the "default H.anything" crowd might start to think seriously about moving to AV1 to drop the revenue of the trolls to zero over time. Hardware support for decode is mostly complete with more CPU's bringing encode online recently. I remember when Steve Jobs went to bat against the trolls for h.264 decode; Apple should do it in his memory.

Separately, Google seriously needs to flex against patent trolls when required. Heck, Lou Rossman is more aggressive than Google on defending the community against patent trolls.

Speaking of which USPTO intends to stop challenges to patent trolls and maybe you, dear reader, should spend five minutes to fire off an email to help EFF try to head this one off at the pass.

I used to have many magazine subscriptions.

They would each mail me a reminder to renew my subscription.

If I sent them a check my subscription would continue. If I didn't send them a check my subscription would end.

I didn't have auto- anything. I didn't have to call to cancel.

The same went for when I was a paperboy. You pay for your week or you stop getting papers. When you remember to pay you start getting papers again.

I think this is how subscriptions have worked for hundreds of years, with auto-renew on a payment card developing in the past couple decades.

Without a contractual definition the corpus of caselaw would very likely date to throughout the history of the country.

10 years for this is bullshit.
Like all computer crimes, the estimated damage is grossly inflated. This doesnâ(TM)t even sound like the damage typical of a ransomware attack.

The guy is getting screwed.

> quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons

Would it be too much to ask to call them Heisenberg Compensators? Please, it would be fun.

China's geology is really bad for petroleum production. A bad lot in the luck of the draw.

They are building a monster pipeline and rail system across Mongolia and Siberia to Russian reserves but it's a decadal project.

Electric transportation is a smart option for their situation. Their necessity has become their Mother of Invention and they are dominating the world in electric power systems innovation.